My husband, Shayne, has almost died more than once.
Some days that sentence feels clinical, like something pulled from a chart. Type 1 diabetes. A heart attack. A stroke. Going almost blind multiple times. All before fifty. Other days, it feels like a fault line running quietly beneath my life. When you love someone whose body has betrayed them, you begin living in two timelines at once. In one, you are planning dinner, arguing about errands, laughing at something ridiculous on television. In the other, you are silently rehearsing the unimaginable. Hospital corridors. A doctor clearing his throat. The shape of your life alone.
This is anticipatory grief. It is not dramatic. It does not always announce itself. It hums beneath joy. It is the reflex to brace before impact, the habit of loving with one hand while the other hovers near the exit.
There is a story some of us carry that lives underneath our relationships, our ambition, and even our tenderness. Often, we do not realize it is there. The story sounds like this: Don’t get too attached. This won’t last. Prepare now so it hurts less later. I call it anticipatory abandonment.
Anticipatory abandonment is not a character flaw. It is a strategy. It is what the nervous system does when it has been overwhelmed by loss before. It decides that surprise is the enemy. It decides that hope is dangerous. It chooses armour.
My armour formed early. When addiction stole my father from my day-to-day life, no one explained substance use, mental illness, or the complicated terrain of loving someone who cannot show up the way you need. There was no language for what was happening. There was silence, yelling, anger, and missed birthdays. I watched doors instead of playing. I learned that love was unreliable and that waiting was dangerous. I absorbed the belief that if someone left, it was because I was not enough. And if someone stayed, I shouldn’t get comfortable, because it was temporary.
Shame loves certainty, even when that certainty wounds us. So I became skilled at predicting loss before it arrived. I lowered my expectations and raised my independence. I learned to be impressive instead of vulnerable, helpful instead of needy, fine instead of honest. Anticipatory abandonment often disguises itself as strength. It sounds like “I’ve got this.” It earns praise for resilience and self-sufficiency. Underneath, it is fear dressed up as competence.
Anxiety amplified the story by keeping me scanning for danger. Depression cautioned me not to hope too loudly. I believed that if I could stay ahead of disappointment, I could control the pain. Then grief arrived and dismantled that illusion.
When my parents died, their deaths not only broke my heart. They activated every unprocessed moment of abandonment that came before. The obvious ruptures and the subtle ones. Grief goes straight for the place that already knows the language of leaving. Their deaths felt like confirmation of the story I had rehearsed for years. This is how it ends. Everyone goes. Staying is an illusion.
Whether grief is truly a form of abandonment is a philosophical question. Death is not a decision to leave, yet the body does not always distinguish between intentional departure and permanent absence. It only registers loss. What hurt most was not just that they were gone. It was the collapse of hope that staying could ever feel safe.
When my husband had his stroke, that old story roared back to life. I began living with one foot in the present and one in a future where I was a widow. I found myself measuring joy against risk. If we laughed too hard, a part of me whispered, Remember, this can disappear.
Anticipatory grief is not about pessimism. It is about protection. It is a way of loving while bracing, of belonging without fully arriving, of staying connected while keeping your heart slightly out of reach. But armour has a cost. When we pre-grieve the people in front of us, we cannot fully inhabit them. When we expect loss, we struggle to let ourselves be held by presence. When we prepare for abandonment, we abandon ourselves first.
The nervous system believes it is keeping us safe. In reality, it is shrinking our capacity for joy.
Healing has not meant pretending that loss will not come. Love will always involve risk. Grief is the price of admission for connection. To love deeply is to sign a contract we cannot control. Healing has meant changing the story. It has meant noticing when my mind runs ahead to catastrophe and gently guiding it back to the kitchen table, to the sound of my husband’s laugh, to the warmth of his hand in mine. It has meant accepting medical realities while refusing to let them steal today.
Anticipatory abandonment loosens its grip when shame is met with empathy, when we name the pattern without judgment, when we honour the younger versions of ourselves who built armour because no one else was protecting them. Of course, you brace. Of course, you try to stay ahead of the hurt. You learned that love could disappear without warning.
The bravest work is not convincing yourself that nothing will ever hurt again. The bravest work is choosing to stay open anyway. Presence is not denial. It is courage. It is acknowledging fragility and still deciding to sit fully in this moment, to taste the food, to feel the sunlight, to listen without rehearsing goodbye.
We do not know what the future holds for the people we love or for ourselves. We never have. Anticipatory grief promises that rehearsal will soften the blow. It does not. What it does do is steal the middle of the story.
Right now, my husband is here. He is alive. His health is imperfect, yet he is a resilient, full-of-life human. I cannot control the length of our story. I can only choose how present I am inside it, drinking in every moment we have together. So I practice putting both feet in the same timeline. This one.
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